Unneeded External Hard Drive Melting SuSE 10.3
 

I've toddled my way through Linux just enough to get it installed on a dedicated machine which my department uses as a webserver and database. Being responsible, I purchased a 500GB USB 2.0 external hard drive and hooked it to the machine today to back up the database. The partitioner in YaST couldn't do anything with it, so I hooked it up to my Windows machine and formatted it NTFS. Then I hooked it back up to the SuSE box and formatted it ext3. Well, it still wouldn't write to it so I went and formatted it back as NTFS on my windows machine, then hooked it back up to the SuSE box.

Then I rebooted.

I can't get SuSE to start now, because it kicks me into this failsafe mode I can't escape from every time. The root partition is fine. I ran fsck on it, it comes up clean (I did unmount it first), but every time I start I get to here:

Waiting for /dev/disk/by-id/usb-SAMSUNG_HD501LJ_152D203380B6-0:0-part1: no more events.
Checking file systems...
fsck 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2007)
error on stat() /dev/disk/by-id/usb-SAMSUNG_HD501LJ_152D203380B6-0:0-part1: No such file or directory
error on stat() /dev/disk/by-id/usb-SAMSUNG_HD501LJ_152D203380B6-0:0-part1: No such file or directory
fsck.ext3: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/disk/by-id/usb-SAMSUNG_HD501LJ_152D203380B6-0:0-part1
/dev/disk/by-id/usb-SAMSUNG_HD501LJ_152D203380B6-0:0-part1
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alterante superblock: e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

fsck.ext3 /dev/disk/by-id/usb-SAMSUNG_HD501LJ_152D203380B6-0:0-part1 failed (status 0x8). Run Manually!
blogd: no message logging because /var file system is not accessible
ehci-hcd ohci-hcd usb-ohci usb-uhci
fsck failed for at least one filesystem (not /).
Please repair manually and reboot.
The root file system is already mounted read-write

Attention:Only CONTROL-D will reboot the system in this maintenance mode. shutdown or reboot will not work.

Give root password for login:
(repair filesystem) #

The external harddrive is blank. Nothing on it. I tried just unplugging it, but the error message and result is identical. If anyone can tell me how to get back into Linux I would be insanely grateful. If I've screwed up and lost the database while trying to back-up...I may need counseling.

Thanks!

When you are in failsafe mode login as root type cd /etc/ than kwrite Fstab so you edit the fstab file if you find the usb drive there delete the lines and then safe it. The original file is than still there with extension.
I hope this will solve you,re problem You also may use any other real linux text editor

I never has this kind of problem before.


all the best

You've gotten me back into the GUI. I'm not going to be fired. I love you.

Thanks!